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Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXIV, Issue 4573, 11 June 1923, Page 4

Announcements have recently been made of experiments by the United States Army Air Service at Dayton, Ohio, in which clouds have been precipitated by spraying them, from an aeroplane, with magnetised sand. Commenting on this, Dr. W. J. Humphreys,, of the United States Weather Bureau, says : “ I have little doubt if strongly electrified sand were placed in the air above a fog sand it would have an attraction for the fog. You can also get rid of a certain fog by building a fire, but it would take a : lot of fire to drive away a London fog. The use of sand for such purposes might constitutes spectacular experiment,, but it would be wholly impracticable, and if a great deal of sand were placed in the air it is possible by experiment to produce a small amount of rain, but either at prohibitive cost, or by substitution of something that would be far worse than drought. The fact of the mat< ter is that few such ideas are new and that we are up against weatherproducing pores of nature so gigantic that, all man can do to control the weather is negligible by comparison. None of the proposals for rain-making and cloud-killing that have come to the attention of the weather bureau are of any practical use, and we are confident from experience of the past that no such panacea is yet in sight.